1. Field of the Invention
The disclosure generally relates to a method and device for reducing signaling overhead, and more particularly relates to a method and device for reducing signaling overhead in machine type communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
For traditional mobile network services, Human-to-Human communications take a major place. For Human-to-Human communications, because both parties involved in the communications are people with the ability to control their behavior, the communications is actually controlled by the behavior of the people. With the development of mobile network services and automatic control technology, a new way of mobile communications have been developed, which is called machine type communications (MTC) (also referred to as “Machine-to-Machine” or “M2M”). Machine type communications may be seen as a form of data communication between entities that do not necessarily need human interaction.
Machine type communications may be used in a variety of areas such as: security, tracking/tracing, healthcare, remote maintenance/control and metering. Machine type communications may be used in surveillance systems, order management, gaming machines and remote monitoring of vital signs. Machine type communications may be used in programmable logic controllers (PLCs), sensors, lighting, and vending machine controls and in applications related to power, gas, water, heating, grid control, and industrial metering. Additionally, machine type communications based on Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology may be used in areas such as customer service.
Depending on its implementation, machine type communications may be different from some current type of communication models. Most machine type communications focus on the transmission of small sizes of data. These applications for small data transmission are characterized by small amounts of transmitted data (e.g. 10˜1000 bytes) during the whole time of the data connection. However, machine type communications devices need to send several control signaling messages to establish the connection between the user equipment (UE) and the base station before data transmission, e.g. msg3 of random access, RRCConectionRequest, RRCConectionSetup, RRCConectionSetupComplete, etc. Meanwhile, the exchange of Non Access Stratum (NAS) layer signaling messages may be configured to be set up between the UE and the network and be carried in Radio Resource Control (RRC) messages.
Generally speaking, when the amount of transmission transmitted by the machine type communications device is large, the amount of the control signaling messages is increased before data transmission. This degrades system throughput and lowers resource efficiency as the control signaling messages take a lot of resources for small size data transmission.
For this reason, methods and devices for reducing signaling overhead are provided for machine type communications applications which have the feature of small data transmission to reduce use of resources generated by signaling overhead and improve resource efficiency.